Opinion

The lead letter to the editor on this page speaks poorly of city officials and The Anderson News.

Frankly, each of us has failed in our missions: the city by not using all available resources to notify the public of a potential health problem; the paper by not effectively doing its job to find out about those problems and let you know.

Rest assured that will not continue to happen on the newspaper’s part and, hopefully, the city’s.

Exercise and video games are two things I’ve never really been able to get in to.

I know that exercising for the sake of exercising is something that everyone should do, but I’ve never been able to continuously, on some sort of schedule make myself exercise just because it’s good for me. Back in high school, I did plenty of exercise disguised in the form of cheerleading practice, but that was because it was exercise in disguise. I had to do it or be a bad cheerleader, and the latter just wasn’t going to happen.

The Anderson County Board of Health Regulation 2004-01a is flawed. It does not address the stated problem that spawned its creation; namely, “that failing septic systems contribute considerable amounts of pollution to groundwater.” How is a failing septic system related to pumping a properly functioning septic tank every three years? The board’s solution equates with treating a broken leg by splinting the sound leg and ignoring the leg with the fractured bone.

Well, folks, the Fantasy Football season is over, and despite my top-notch first half of the season, my team — the Flying Reporters — finished a mediocre fourth place right behind (you guessed it) my husband in third.

I guess that’s what I get for gloating.

Still, for a rookie team, the FRs had a good run, and just because the fantasy season is over doesn’t mean the real season is. Eight teams remain in the playoffs and I’m certainly looking forward to the Super Bowl on Feb. 1.

Those of us addicted to gardening were getting pretty antsy for a fix. I got a chance to read through three of my new catalogues and I’m thrilled with the selections.

Many of you may not start things from seed. Perhaps you don’t grow a big enough garden. Many of you grow just a few things in containers. Seeds are still a great way to start your garden when you want.

We all know that we have a lot of winter yet to go before we turn that first shovel. It’s hard to wait.

This is the time of year when politicians typically offer a state of the union, state or city address, giving their constituents some insight into how their government is doing and what it hopes to accomplish in the coming year.

Given the problems so many newspapers have experienced during 2008, we thought it a good idea to offer you a state of your newspaper address.

If you’re anything like me — and most people I have talked to are, at least in this respect — you’re sitting around wondering where the last week has gone and why it took Christmas with it.

I don’t know if it’s because we’re so busy this time of year, going to this house and eating at that one, but Christmas just seems to fly by. I so look forward to it arriving and getting to spend time with family and friends, but before I even have time to catch my breath, it’s gone.

Considering it’s a little after noon on Monday, and I’m writing this column several hours before an impending winter storm, perhaps it’s fitting that the song running through my head right now begins with the words, “Oh, the weather outside is frightful…”

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years ago, a little girl earned her way onto Santa's naughty list.

All she wanted for Christmas that year was a keyboard. She loved to sing and wanted to learn to play the keyboard to round out her musical talent. She put in her request to her mom, dad, aunts, uncles and even Old Saint Nick.

As the days passed by and Christmas morning grew closer, she was bursting at the seams to know if the keyboard would somehow find its way under her tree.

Editor’s note: The following is an 1897 letter printed in the New York Sun and the reply given by veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church. It has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial. It appears here courtesy of newseum.org.

A question for those of you who think the answer for America’s auto industry woes is for the Big Three to build electric cars: What happens when tens of millions of people pull into their driveways after work and plug them in?

Might not be too terrible a problem here, but when it’s 90 degrees on the West Coast, California already experiences brown outs due to its aging and inadequate electric grid.

I never thought I could become a Southern Cal football fan. Maybe it’s because of the way they repeatedly run roughshod over my University of Michigan Wolverines in the Rose Bowl.

It wasn’t always that way. The Michiganders swamped the Trojans 49-0 in the 1949 Rose Bowl. But that’s ancient history and I didn’t become a Wolverine fan until the 1970s when I moved to Michigan. Since then it has been all University of Southern California. They whipped U of M 14-3 in 1970, 14-6 in 1972, 28-14 in 2004, and 32-18 two years ago.

A Mountain Dew sits to my left and a bag of Doritos sits behind it. When I go home tonight, I know that I’ll either have something to cook for dinner or the money to go to the grocery store and find it.

I say this not to remind you of how much junk food I eat, but to remind you that I’m one of the lucky ones — I have food to eat.

A very giving group of people — led by Tamara Williams — is hosting a dinner tomorrow night at Emma B. Ward Elementary as a fundraiser for those who aren’t so lucky.